Succeeding with Agile

Find an igniting purpose

London Business School professor Lynda Gratton uses the term “hot spot” to refer to a place and time when “working with other people was never more exciting and exhilarating and when you knew deep in your heart that what you were jointly achieving was important and purposeful” (2007, 1). For a hot spot to form, you need what she calls an “igniting purpose,” which is “something that people find exciting and interesting and worth engaging with” (13).

In the mid-1990s I worked at a company that had the igniting purpose of revolutionizing healthcare by changing how patients interacted with providers. This company was built around nurses in a call center, supported by developers writing systems for them. Every week the head ...